At Mountain View High School’s outdoor fields in Loveland, the baseball team isn’t the only group preparing for the game this afternoon.
“I don’t know if we’re gonna be ready for first pitch, but we’ll see,” JD Jacob, a teacher at Mountain View, said. “Better late than never, right?”
Today, he’s helping students unpack cameras, set up equipment and pilot one of their first sports broadcasts. Some students take to the stands, keeping track of runs, outs, and who’s on base. Others, like freshman Levi Freitag, are inside the small, wooden press box in front of a camera doing play-by-play.
“Today is a great day to do some baseball. Don’t you think so?” he said to his co-anchor. “Looks like number 33 is coming up to pitch. Let’s see what happens.”
This is all new for Jacob. His main job is teaching theater — not sports broadcasting.
“I’m an amateur too,” he said as he works on the camera software. “I learned how to do this on YouTube about six months ago.”
Jacob’s launching this brand new course in order to qualify for career and technical education dollars from the state and federal government. CTE generally supports education and skill attainment in careers like business or engineering. It’s the “new STEM,” Jacob said.
Here at Mountain View, Jacob wants to use career and technical education to prepare his students for careers in technical theater, so they learn skills like set design and sound mixing.
He got his official endorsement two years ago from the Department of Education. Now he’s working on adding the necessary classes — sports broadcasting would be part of that — to make the program official.
“I jumped at the chance to connect my students to extra funds, to get them extra opportunities, because that’s really what it’s all about,” Jacob said.
It wasn’t a perfect broadcast — there were a few camera issues and the anchors are still learning the ropes. But Prather said it was not only a fun learning opportunity, but a practical one. He wants to go into a more technical career.
“I actually got to work with the things I’ll be using for my future career,” Prather said. “It’s extremely nice to have this integrated within our school experience, instead of having to leave and go pay money to do it somewhere else.”
Tight funding and shifting priorities
Mountain View High School, which is part of the Thompson School District, is an arts-focused school. But, like many districts, budgets are tight. Jacob said his school is very supportive of the arts, but funding doesn’t always go directly to his theater program.
“They support us in other ways, other than financially, because money is tight everywhere in public education,” he said. “We’ve been given a lot of recognition, which is great. Recognition doesn’t buy microphones.”
As Jacob builds this curriculum from the ground up, he has to actively recruit students for an elective spot in their busy schedules. His school requires him to get 20 students in order to teach them. But if students are already taking band or choir, for instance, they may not have the space.
“It’s kind of like a fight for your continued necessity every single year,” he said. “If I get tired of recruiting and kids stop signing up for theater, eventually, the school won’t be able to justify my continued employment here.”
But CTE is changing the game for Jacob. Not only could his school receive funding for teaching these theater-based classes, but students could gain the skills they need to make the arts their full-time gig after graduation.
“The fact that Colorado is saying we value theatrical design and technology as a pathway of career is a really good thing for arts teachers,” he said.
Access to arts education varies by district
Access to arts education varies across the state. Teachers and individual schools report that some students have less instruction per week. Some districts have reduced staffing. Others have cut programs altogether. The Colorado Department of Education lacks comprehensive data on arts offerings in schools.
Think 360 Arts For Learning, a state education nonprofit, found that in 2024, the number of credentialed arts teachers declined by 5%, or around 150 fewer teachers, from the previous year.
Dramatic Arts, or theater, had the steepest decline in credentialed teachers. Additionally, of the 187 school districts in Colorado, 164 of them had no certified Dramatic Arts teachers. That’s nearly 90%.
“The days of a comprehensive high school having four or five art teachers…that’s an antiquated existence,” said Andy Stevens, the director of career and college readiness for the Thompson School District.
Stevens said students are prioritizing their time differently. They want off-hours so they can work a job in the afternoon. They want study halls to keep up with schoolwork during the day so they can make sports practice in the afternoon. And they need their core credits to graduate.
He believes CTE will help keep these arts classes alive, as long as they are tied to a technical skill. While funds have been available for decades, CTE dollars must be used to train students for well-paying, in-demand jobs in Colorado. Stevens said most kinds of fine arts are not seen this way.
“The state of Colorado views those as hobbies, not careers,” he said. “Most people are not going to make a living performing. They’re going to make a living as a sound engineer.”
But CTE’s use for arts-related careers is slowly growing. Currently, more than 160 high schools across the state host arts-related CTE programs, according to Colorado Community College System data, which manages CTE for the state. It’s the second-most-popular career cluster in Colorado — around 24,000 students. Around 40 districts — including Brighton, Poudre and Jefferson County — have technical theater programs.
The origins of Jacob’s tech theater program at Mountain View High School in Loveland have already impacted Kajsa Oresjo. The senior has co-directed some of the school’s productions and took a few of Jacob’s classes.
“I feel almost less like a student learning something, and more like I’m actually helping us put on all these productions and stuff,” she said.
Now, Oresjo plans to study theater design at the University of Northern Colorado. Her parents were supportive, but asked her to research what she’d make as a theater technician. Oresjo feels prepared, but she’s bummed that the full CTE program wasn’t available to her in high school.
“I think if I had the opportunity to know a little bit more about every single area and have some of those certifications as I was leaving, I might be more inclined to maybe wait on the four year education and instead just start working,” she said.
Oresjo believes Jacob’s future technical classes will set students up well, no matter if they choose theatre or not.
“Actors, without technicians, are just people who can sing and dance and act and stuff,” she said. “But technicians, if there’s no theater, they’re just people with a lot of marketable skills…there’s so many more opportunities than you think there are.”
Jacob will soon apply for state approval of his full CTE program. When his sports broadcasting program launches in the fall, his students will be covering football and girl’s volleyball.